If the Unionists had retained the State organization and
government, however small their number, they would have held the
State, and the government would have been bound to recognize and
to defend them as such with all the force of the Union. The
rebellion would then have been personal, not territorial. But
such was not the case. The State organization, the State
government, the whole State authority rebelled, made the
rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists, very
respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at
home, in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective
States, and shorn of all political status or rights. Their
political status was simply that of the old loyalists, or
adherents of the British crown in the American war for
Independence, and it was as absurd to call them the State, as it
would have been for Great Britain to have called the old Tories
the colonies.
The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that
the people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the
power of the Union vests in the General government. The first,
as we have seen, is the principle of so-called "squatter
sovereignty," embodied in the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which
gave birth, in opposition, to the Republican party of 1856.
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